Sunday, Nov 1 2009-Understanding Matters of Policy Making- First draft

 In the unfortunate transition from free writing to digitally formatted text I have been left far behind and am now catching up.  While I am at intuitively averse to the idea of journalism being a profession that is available t everyone, I think the organisation of "blogs" and the ability to share work provides me with enough motivation to write down a few of my thoughts today.

I just wanted to quickly explain for any one who may read this why I put it up and what my posts in this section are about.  This post entitled Bookmarks and Links is intended to correspond with my digg account (angofiles) that I have set up and where I post articles of interest to me.

Over the next two months I will try and examine articles that have something to do with the moral responsibilities of policy makers and might provide an aside argument that cases of international war crimes be limited in the near future to dictatorships and despotic regimes and not be applied to high level government officials or their counsel.  Foreign policy makers have historically adhered to the decision theory on which goals are acheived by force, but the fact is that the environment in which foreign policy makers reach decisions is dominated far more now by objective concerns.  It is these objective concerns about developing policies which are empirically sound, and unfettered at the personal level which determine an agent's having made good choices.

Moral responsibility can always be stipulated upon an individual for their actions, however these kinds of stipulations are made at the personal level.  There is an objective quality though in which the agent as policy maker is responsible for the planning and design of a strategy in order to acheieve a goal which is in the natioanal interest.  Therein lies a pretty ad hoc account of my views on american foreign policy.  My purpose here was to address an article by David Brooks; The Bush Paradox.  I wanted to explain the obsession americans/and many others in the WESTERN world still have with demeaning the Bush regime in all respects.  Finally, this type of attitude is a product of media, economic, and political cycles but it disappears if one reflects on the above point about the environment of policy makers in the western world compared to the dictatorships in Libya and Equatorial Guinea.

Hopefully next time I will come better prepared.  Questions to think about (for me to think about) are which theories of judgements/decisions correspond to what kinds of various game scenarios.